


every spark of friendship and love will die without a home

by jonphaedrus



Series: intervention [3]
Category: Cosmere - Brandon Sanderson, Elantris - Brandon Sanderson
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Fix-It, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-09
Updated: 2016-02-09
Packaged: 2018-05-19 08:32:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5960911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jonphaedrus/pseuds/jonphaedrus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Spymaster, they call him, in lieu of any other name. They say he single-handedly stopped Fjorden from taking Arelon twice, both times almost dying for it. That he is as much married to the royal couple as they are to each other is an openly-kept secret, as if the tall, dark-haired princess with his dark eyes and short temper did not give that away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	every spark of friendship and love will die without a home

**Author's Note:**

> aaand we're done. this was A Ride.

Hvela has his eyes, has his hair, but has her mother’s narrow face and full lips. When she takes her first few steps, Hrathen is there holding her hands, her chubby feet pattering on the glowing stones of the Elantris palace as Raoden calls her over, his arms waiting for her when she breaks away from her father and stumbles the last few steps over to her _other_ father.

“Far,” the children call him, Fjordell for Father, even though only Hvela is his.

“Better to have a happy accident than one that ends in tears,” Sarene tells her father, when they visit Teod, the princess who clearly is _not_ her husband’s child blushing and hiding her face in her mother’s hair.

“You never could do things the easy way,” Eventeo replies, shaking his head.

 

  

 _You never could do things the easy way_ , those are the words that stick in Hrathen’s head for years afterward. He had never meant to end up a father, almost-married, waking up with Sarene on one side of him, elbowing him hard in the ribs with her sharp arms and Raoden sprawled, cool and comfortable, over his shoulder.

It is better than the alternative, though. The alternative where the tomb outside of Kae isn’t empty, where he died in Teod. Hrathen is grateful every day, thanks Jaddeth for this chance to really make things right. He pushes back against Wyrn wherever he can, and the deep, abiding pleasure of watching the man’s plans crumble about him like a sandcastle is half the reason he does it, half the reason Hrathen reaches out to those dissatisfied elements he know hide in the Empire and turn them against Wulfden.

 _My problem is with Wyrn, not with Jaddeth_ , he had said once. He had meant those words then, and they had never left. He does not blame Raoden for banning Shu-Dereth in Arelon; he would have done the same in the king’s shoes. Instead, Hrathen finds ways to integrate Derthi and Korathi teachings, helps retain his identity while bringing something new to the religious teachings.

He misses Fjorden and its soaring mountains, the winter snows. He misses his family and friends, now long gone, thinking him dead or a traitor or both. So he teaches all of the children Fjordell and they grow up switching between languages like most people change clothes, much to Sarene’s frustration as she picks up the language through sheer repeated exposure, and to Raoden’s amusement, because the three children whisper it together out of Hrathen’s hearing, keeping secrets from their parents.

Wyrn tries to tear them down, crush the city, grind them to dust. Hrathen pulls his strings and severs them, one by one. He cuts the man off at the seams, and each foot forward is vicious pleasure. It won’t be in his lifetime that Fjorden falls, but he will do everything he can to stop it, and he does. They whisper about him, _The Spymaster_ , who rarely leaves the palace and never leaves Elantris.

The stark fear and terror on the faces of captured Derethi spies when Hrathen interrogates them and they realise that not only did one of theirs turn, but _Hrathen_ , who had toppled Duladel, who had become Gyorn younger than anyone thought possible. Hrathen, who had died in the attempt to take Arelon. 

Hrathen, who had worked his hands to the bone, bleeding for the defence of his chosen country. Wyrn Wulfden would not take Arelon while he lived, while his children lived, while Sarene and Raoden lived. Arelon would stand long after he was gone, even if he did truly die in her defence.

The Spymaster was not what he would have chosen, but it fit him better than heavy red armour ever had.

 

  

The inevitable happens. Eventually, Hrathen must return to Fjorden, even if he doesn’t want to. They take him back not in a casket but atop the back of a horse, and he goes himself. Wulfden has priests crowing nearly from rooftops that the time has come to crush Arelon (and how will he fail this time, short of sending fifty Dilafs to throw themselves on the walls of Elantris or burning the country to the ground to smoke out the near-gods hiding behind their monstrously high walls?) and he must go.

He must. Himself. Hrathen bears the weight of the sins that are now being brought against Arelon, for it is his hands that are dirtied with the spilled blood of Duladel. 

Roial had yelled himself blue in the face, but Hrathen had left, left kith and kin for a land where if he was caught the very _best_ outcome was death, if not something far, far worse. He knows if they find him, he’ll be lucky to simply die on his way to Wyrn Wulfden’s seat.

Every night he sleeps in Fjorden, huddled around the exterior of Dakhor Monastery, watching and waiting, too loathe to send in his spies to certain hell, Hrathen dreams of them dragging him before Wulfden and the knowledge that if he bows his head and submits, they may simply run him through then and there, instead of giving him back to Dakhor, from whence he came, and using him for something far, far worse. 

The thought that Hrathen himself could be sacrificed so that they could tear down the walls of Elantris haunts his waking moments. The thought that they could kill him while the children watch haunts his dreams.

 

 

They catch him outside Dakhor, two months later. He escapes only by virtue of his horse and he rides the animal near to a lather before fighting the last four monks. By the time they discover that he favours his right hand, using their own power against him, three are already dead, and he is limping heavily from what is likely a sprained ankle. The fourth nearly breaks his arm and takes his sword in the process, and Hrathen ends up on the ground, his back bleeding in a line between his shoulderblades that was meant to take his head off, and the fear and shock is the only thing that leaves him detached when he blocks the blade with his right hand and watches it cut down to the bone, peel back skin and muscle.

It’s almost horrific, as his own blood gushes from his wrist and the skin peeled away from the bone, but Hrathen still wrests the sword from the last monk and ignores the pulse pounding in his head and the black at the edges of his vision as he chokes the man until he stops moving.

The searing pain later, as Hrathen cuts the bloodied wreckage of his right forearm off below the elbow, and his muffled, pained scream when he has to cauterise it shut, is a mix of surreal night horror and over-bright memory, coupled with pain far worse than he’d felt when he had collapsed on the Teolin docks, Sarene’s face in his eyes.

There, he had no regrets.

Here, he has too many.

He hopes the horse will lead him home, and Hrathen lingers in the liminal space between life and death, surrounded by darkness and overwhelming pain for so long he loses the space, falls into and into and _under_.

 

  

“Get his legs,” says the voice that sounds suspiciously like Sarene, and the cold rain is wet on his face.

“’Ene,” Hrathen whispers, and fingers caress his face, cool lips press to his skin, he’s so hot, and the rain is freezing. “’Ene,”

“You have a lot to answer for,” Sarene’s voice whispers, and Hrathen wants to open his eyes, reaching his right hand for her, is met with a flare of brilliant pain that whites out, and out, and out. 

“My saddlebags,” he whispers, and Sarene’s fingers touch his cheeks, his chin.

“Please don’t die,” she whispers somewhere into his darkness. “Please.”

He sleeps.

 

 

Hrathen surfaces to the light and, like the first time he awoke in Elantris, wakes up to Sarene and Raoden cramming their foreheads into one another, staring down at him. Unlike last time, grey touches Sarene’s blonde hair around her temples and lines wrinkle her brow. Her lips are softer than they used to be, crumpling in at the edges with stress. Raoden has hardly changed a day, his silver skin still elastic and young, and Hrathen smiles. His face feels wrong.

“You’re too old to be giving me near-death scares,” Sarene tells him, punches him in the arm. “You couldn’t have at least found someone to cut it off cleanly? You infected the wound and almost died."

“I was a little busy at the time,” Hrathen finds himself replying, and his voice sounds hoarse. For the first time, he feels the sixty-five he is, tired and aching and like someone has wrung him out. “I did the best I could.” Sarene punches him again, and Raoden presses their foreheads together, and Hrathen feels a missing ache below his elbow where his hand should be, lost to Fjorden, but that’s all right.

“I’m glad you’re home,” Sarene tells him.

He agrees.

 

 

 _The Spymaster_ , they call him, in lieu of any other name. They say he single-handedly stopped Fjorden from taking Arelon twice, both times almost dying for it. That he is as much married to the royal couple as they are to each other is an openly-kept secret, as if the tall, dark-haired princess with his dark eyes and short temper did not give that away.

However, he looks much smaller up close. The first Derethi ambassador is shown into the man’s office, and finds that instead of some robust man the same age as the King and Queen, there is an old Fjorden man sitting in the chair there, his square face rendered craggy and worn by the passage of time, short hair sparse and mostly white. He has to be well over eighty years old, but his brown eyes are shrewd and bright and the near-permanent lines that ring his mouth show his scowl and reputation are not for show. 

“Sit down,” says the Spymaster, gesturing left-handed to the extra chair, and the Ambassador slowly lowers himself down. The Spymaster wears as much red as he himself does, an unusual affectation in Elantris or Arelon in general, given the colour’s connection to the Fjordell Empire and the disaster that was Wulfden. “You are not the Gyorn I expected,” the Spymaster says at last, and his voice is thickly accented in Arelish, the distinctive sharpness of Fjordell colouring all of his vowels. “You were not sent to convert us.”

“I was,” admits the ambassador. “However, Wyrn believes a third disaster on Arelish soil is best averted.” The Spymaster made a quiet noise, a smile touching the edge of his craggy mouth. “My orders are to see Arelish Shu-Korath and Elantrian worship aligned with Shu-Dereth, so that we may bring Jaddeth to earth without a second Duladel.” 

“I like this new Wyrn,” said the Spymaster, to the young man who stood beside his desk, who had remained silent the whole time so far. He was clearly the elder prince, Roial, with Queen Sarene’s narrow face and over-long noise but King Raoden’s mop of brown hair and bright blue eyes. “Already, he has learned genocide isn’t the solution.” The Prince didn’t reply, and both men looked at the Ambassador.

“You know who I am?” the Spymaster says at last, and the Ambassador looks down at where his right arm is missing below the elbow, and his blood-red clothes, tailored loose and comfortable.

“Yes,” the Ambassador whispers, because Gyorn Hrathen supposedly died on the Teolin docks, shot with an arrow, fighting the Gradget of Dakhor. He survived sneaking into and out of Fjorden, and losing an arm. He has survived everything, and here he sits, his dark eyes quiet. “You are Hrathen.”

“I am,” says the Spymaster. “And while I live I will not see Arelon fall to Shu-Dereth. While my children live this country will be free.” He switches suddenly to Fjordell, and the Ambassador is unsettled by this man, a traitor, using his mother tongue. “I said once to the Queen that my problem was not with Jaddeth, but with Wyrn. As long as you are here to find peaceful resolution, you will move about relatively unwatched. However, the _moment_ you bring Fjordell forces down upon our heads, I will personally destroy everything you are with my own bare hands while you watch.” The Spymaster pauses, and suddenly the Ambassador understands. He sees now, how Hrathen destroyed Duladel so completely, and almost Arelon as well. “Do we have an understanding?”

“Yes,” the Ambassador says, at last, and the Spymaster nods, then gestures with the stump of his elbow, as if waving a hand. “Now go.”

The Ambassador does.

 

 

There is no great pomp when Hrathen dies. His tomb, after all, already exists. His eulogy was given by Sarene nearly fifty years before. They bury him, and place his armour once again atop the tomb.

Before, that was what he had been. A memory, the ghost of Fjordell who had turned against his home to save them all. Something not-quite, still misunderstood.

Instead, at his funeral, children and grandchildren talk, and laugh, and cry. Raoden gives his wife his hand, and she snaps at him that even though he might be shiny and young, she at her advanced age of seventy-give can handle herself quite well, thanks. A remarkable number of jokes are cracked in Fjordell, and Korathi and Derethi prayers are said. Someone asks if they should request his arm back from Fjorden in exchange for allowing them to open a Derethi temple in Elantris, and Hvela says something rude.

For the first time in a hundred years, it snows in Elantris on the day Hrathen dies, and standing over the grave, Sarene sitting on the great stone tomb, Raoden looks up and smiles.

“He loved snow,” says the King, and the Queen sighs.

“Only Hrathen would die and dump snow on us.” 

They say nothing, and watch the great flakes drift down, hold hands there in the cold amongst their extended family, in the place where it all began and now, has ended. 

“This is going to ruin the plumbing,” Sarene murmurs, eventually, to Raoden’s assent. 

Frankly, it is probably what Hrathen would have wanted.


End file.
